Album Review: Solar Bears - She Was Coloured In

For better or (usually) worse, modern instrumental music tends to be lazily lumped into one of two categories: either you swell some of your instruments like Mogwai, or you use none at all, and toe the cinematic line. While Dublin/Wicklow duo Solar Bears may have committed everything on this, their debut LP, live to tape, they very much fall into the latter category. However, you don’t need to recognise a snippet of Jack Nicholson’s voice at the more

Solar Bears She Was Coloured In

Two interesting news items for enthusiasts of the inner world have coincided in time (within a day or two). One is the decision of the Charity Commission to consider Druidism as a religion in the UK, and not only a pagan practice for a few nuts who still believe that Merlin and King Arthur were historical figures. That is to say, that you yourself—if you are a citizen of Great Britain—can be a Druid in the same way that you can be a Muslim or a more

Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In

In a world that is beset by illegal wars, natural disasters and Michael Laws calibre racists, it is only natural that musicians should try to produce music chill enough to counteract a fundamentally un-chill world.

Unfortunately, most efforts have bounced off my thick, un-chill hide which has been hardened by study, angst, and the crushing disappointment of listening to bands that were thought to be chill, but were actually chronically more

Review: Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In

Clocking in at nearly an hour, She Was Coloured In, the debut album from Irish duo Solar Bears, could not be appreciated in any other format but as a long-player. John Kowalski and Rian Trench pair live string and guitar instrumentation with an array of synths and digital effects to create a sort of anti-electronica that fights against the sometimes plastic coldness of the genre with organic warmth.